Thermal Analysis of Blood Flow Alterations in Human Hand and Foot Based on Vascular-Porous Media Model

Microvascular and Macrovascular diseases are serious complications of diabetic mellitus, which significantly affect the life quality of diabetic patients. Quantitative description of the relationship between temperature and blood flow is considerably important for non-invasive detection of blood vessel structural and functional lesions. In this study, thermal analysis has been employed to predict blood flow alterations in a foot and a cubic skin model successively by using a discrete vessel-porous media model and further compared the blood flows in 31 diabetic patients. The tissue is regarded as porous media whose liquid phase represents the blood flow in capillaries and solid phase refers to the tissue part. Discrete vascular segments composed of arteries, arterioles, veins, and venules were embedded in the foot model. In the foot thermal analysis, the temperature distributions with different inlet vascular stenosis were simulated. The local temperature area sensitive to the reduction of perfusion was obtained under different inlet blood flow conditions. The discrete vascular-porous media model was further applied in the assessment of the skin blood flow by coupling the measured skin temperatures of diabetic patients and an inverse method. In comparison with the estimated blood flows among the diabetic patients, delayed blood flow regulation was found in some of diabetic patients, implying that there may be some vascular disorders in these patients. The conclusion confirms the one in our previous experiment on diabetic rats. Most of the patients predicted to be with vascular disorders were diagnosed as vascular complication in clinical settings as well, suggesting the potential applications of the vascular-porous media model in health management of diabetic patients.